Intelligence examines cargo flight from Baghdad to Belarus (Saddam's SAFE HAVEN?)

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has obtained safe haven in Belarus, several intelligence agencies believe.

Western intelligence sources said several intelligence agencies in the Middle East and Europe base this assessment on new information about a March 29 flight from Baghdad to Minsk. They said the flight of a chartered cargo plane could have transported Saddam, his sons and much of his family to Belarus.

"There's no proof that Saddam was on the plane but we have proof that a plane left on that day from Baghdad airport and arrived in Minsk," a senior intelligence source said. "If you can think of anybody else who could obtain permission to fly out of Baghdad in the middle of a war, then please tell me."

U.S. officials and Iraqi opposition sources said Saddam and his sons appear to have escaped two assassination attempts during the war. But they did not confirm the registration of a cargo flight from Baghdad to Minsk on March 29, Middle East Newsline reported.

The sources said the cargo aircraft took off from an unspecified Baghdad-area airport and entered Iranian air space on the flight toward Minsk. They said Iran did not attempt to interfere with the Iraqi flight.

About two weeks later, a registration of the cargo flight was found by the U.S. military in wake of the capture of the airport and the rest of the Baghdad area. Baghdad International Airport was captured on April 4.

U.S. officials said Saddam had been exploring the prospect of fleeing to Belarus over the last year. They said the Iraqi ruler was in close contact with Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko and that Minsk became a major military supplier to Baghdad.

Within hours after the departure of the cargo flight to Minsk on March 29, the Saddam regime was awash with rumors that the president had escaped. Intelligence sources said the rumors spread rapidly throughout the military command and among field officers.

"There was a significant decline in Iraqi combat strength starting from around March 31," an intelligence source said. "In interviews with coalition interrogators, Iraqi commanders have attributed the decline in combat to the feeling that Saddam had fled."

In Washington, Sen. Bob Graham, former chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, said on Thursday that a senior Saddam aide had been captured in Syria over the previous 24 hours. Graham did not identify the aide, but said he held one of the most sensitive positions in the regime.

The aide was believed to be Izzat Eddin Ibrahim Al Douri, vice chairman of the Revolutionary Council and the man who spent the longest amount of time with Saddam in power.

On Wednesday, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said Saddam was believed to be alive and hiding somewhere in Iraq. "In the end we don't know, but it is still our best judgment that he is [in Iraq]," Hoon said.

"As each day goes by, as we continue to search those places he may be hiding, we have to keep an open mind, but it is still my best judgment."

On Thursday, U.S. officials reported that Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, regarded as the Western face of the Saddam regime, surrendered to U.S. military authorities. They said Aziz, who last month had vowed to die rather than be detained, held negotiations with the United States on the terms of his surrender.

Would permission have to have been given by the U.S. for this flight to get past coalition air forces?

Certainly, if we wanted to give Saddam a back-door out of Baghdad to incetivize him not to release his WMD. And we know that we have been making overtures to Saddam to take exile for over a year now. Having kept the the 9/11-anthrax connection ambiguous, it was perfectly politically possible to do that, of course. Note the tension, however, between the following two statements:

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I’m not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can’t say that. On the other hand, since we did that interview, new information has come to light. And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the al-Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years. We’ve seen in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohamed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center. The debates about, you know, was he there or wasn’t he there, again, it’s the intelligence business.
"Meet the Press," 9/8/02
DONALD RUMSFELD: To avoid a war, I would be... personally, would recommend that some provision be made so that the senior leadership in that country and their families could be provided haven in some other country. And I think that that would be a fair trade to avoid a war.
"This Week," 1/19/03

Imagine Rumsfeld or Bush making an exile offer if Cheney's implication had ever been disambiguated. Can you see why the administration, far from being desperate to link Saddam to 9/11, as the liberal media has suggested, has actually been doing its level best to prevent such a connection from becoming clear and unambiguous? They have to think about the end game, about how the situation can be defused safely. Pointing the finger at Saddam doesn't further that end.

Now, if Saddam had accepted our offer before the war and, some months later, the 9-11 connection became disambiguated, it wouldn't have been a problem. We'd just say "Well, darn!, if only we'd known , too late to anything about now, a deal's a deal." In that context, the story would be forgotten in a few news cycles and everybody would just go back to being glad the whole situation had been resolved and worrying about their 401-Ks.

Unfortunately, Saddam held out -- probably figuring we were bluffing and wouldn't risk a deadly end-game involving WMD. Instead, we upped the ante. But, if the main reason for offering Saddam exile in the first place was his WMD -- and not just to save some blood in a conventional war -- than that dynamic doesn't change after hostilities begin. Only, in that situation, it would no longer be publicly acceptable for the US to associate itself with the offer or the negotiations, because then it would be clear that we were being blackmailed: having invaded the country, what possible reason could there be for letting Saddam off the hook, other than our being intimidated by his WMD? At that point, any such negotiations would have to be attributed to Russia or Arab allies -- which is not a problem, since we have been using them as middlemen in exile negotiations for the past year already. I don't think that we'd want him to pop up in Russia or Saudi, though. If we claim to have no part in such a deal -- being forced by Saddam's intransigence to do so -- then, if unambiguous evidence of his authorship of 9-11 came to light, it would be politically highly embarassing not to seak his extradition. Which gets us back to the problem of his being incentivized to pick up the phone and tell terrorists were those vials of biological WMD are cached.

A deal where Saddam ends up hosted by some friendly dictator who lives in the shadow of the United States or one of its allies could provide the pretext for not forcing the issue of extradition if the 9-11 cat ever gets out of the bag. Belarus might fit that bill, although, from my reading, it seems a bit close to the EU to given a potential 9/11 mastermind safe haven. I don't buy this particular story -- for one thing, Saddam was clearly in Baghdad, addressing a cheering crowd and telling them that their country had been conquered but that they would be rewarded in heaven, as late as April 9, long after this cargo flight occured. Of course, it's possible that this is a teaser, and the timeline has been adjusted for public consumption to minimize the more embarassing aspects of the situation. Things can always be fixed up later fror the history books, but in the short-term, managing public perception of the denoument on a news cycle by news cycle basis is the overriding concern.

Frankly, if we do end up either arresting Saddam or extraditing him from a foreign country to face a war crimes trial, I would have to guess that Cheney's 9-11 connection and Bush's WMD story were simply red herrings all along. But that hasn't happened, so far. So, it will be most interesting to see how this plays out.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.